Friends of Sable Island is offering a $1,000 scholarship in 2018 to promote learning and awareness about Canada’s 43rd National Park.

Sable Island is a 41-kilometre stretch of sand located approximately 290 kilometres southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It is home to many species of animals and plants, including between 150 and 400 wild horses. The Island is also home to many birds, including small numbers of the threatened Roseate Tern, and is the only breeding ground of the rare Ipswich Sparrow. Also living on Sable Island is the largest congregation of breeding Grey Seals and a small resident population of Harbour Seals.

There has been a continuous human presence on Sable Island since 1801 when the colonial government in Nova Scotia founded a lifesaving establishment in an effort to reduce the suffering and loss of life and cargo that resulted from the frequent shipwrecks on and near Sable’s shores.There are an estimated 350 shipwrecks near Sable Island, the most recent being in 1999. Sable Island gained international attention in the 1970s with the discovery of oil and gas reserves on Sable Island Bank. Nova Scotia’s economy continues to benefit from offshore petroleum activity near Sable Island.

Scholarship Details

The Friends of Sable Island Society $1000 (CDN) scholarship is open to any grade 12 student in the Nova Scotia school system

Monies must be applied to a post-secondary educational institution in 2018. Funds will be paid to the post-secondary institution on the student’s behalf.

Form of submission is the student’s choice: some examples are a 3-minute creative video, journal entry, feature story, op-ed, short story, original piece of art, speech, poster, news report, dialogue, 500 word essay, or poem.

Submissions are to be sent to scholarships@sableislandfriends.ca by April 16, 2018.

Submissions are to be accompanied by a completed Sable Island Scholarship 2018 application form, a reflective statement, a current resume and a transcript from the most recent reporting period indicating a grade point average of 75+

The reflective statement should be 250 words or less on what Sable Island means to you and why you have applied for this scholarship

All copyright rules must be followed, for example, permission to use music or other people’s images must be obtained and submitted with the application.

Videos must be in one of the following formats: .MOV; .MPEG4; .AVI; .WMV.

Pictures of artwork or posters must be in high definition .JPG, .PNG or .PDF format. (The Friends of Sable Island reserves the right to make arrangements to view artwork in person.)

Papers, poems or essays must be in non-scanned .PDF format.

Judging

Creativity, clarity, accuracy and content will be used for the evaluation of the submissions.